From: Adam Date: 2009-01-14T00:54:13+09:00 Subject: the Mobile Application Development Challenge The meteoric growth in smartphones device volume and diversity is one of the few bright spots in the technology industry recently. But developers trying to build mobile apps are stymied by the extreme difficulty of writing mobile apps for multiple device operating systems especially when there is no clear winner and diversity is just increasing. Rhodes solves this dilemma for mobile developers by letting them write once for all leading smartphones. And do it much more productively by writing most of the interface in Ruby and HTML rather than Java, Objective-C, or C++. Our Ruby-based mobile application framework, Rhodes, ships with several sample applications for sales (SugarCRM), field service (Siebel OnDemand) and issue tracking (Lighthouse). However, we want to see more samples that demonstrate the power of the framework, and the ease with which robust mobile enterprise applications can be built. Our developer community is generally working on proprietary applications under our commercial license. To spur more examples available as open source, we are holding an application development contest. First prize of $10,000 will be awarded to the individual or company building the best mobile application with Rhodes. Rules and steps for application submission are available at http://rhomobile.com/contest. Applications must be submitted to Rhomobile by April 30, 2009. Prizes will be awarded on May 15, 2009.